I'm glad there are so many crape myrtle trees in my gardens.
They provide wonderful color with their varied blossoms in summer
and their brilliant colors in fall.

One dogwood is a heavenly red wine color, and a neighbor's
Modesto ash is as yellow as the gingkos in front of the Lodi
Woman's Club. And the best is yet to come: The large Japanese maple
is just beginning to turn color. It puts nearly everybody else to
shame.

(In case anyone is wondering, yes, it is crape, not crepe, when
speaking of the myrtle. Crepe is a kind of material dresses used to
be made of.)

Speaking of trees, my friend Joyce Harmon has a bunch of young
oak trees in 5-gallon pots and she is looking for foster "parents"
to care for them until they are ready for planting, preferably in
one of the city parks. Ed DeBenedetti park certainly needs this
kind of attention, now that work is beginning there.

Now that there is so much concern about city funds, etc., Joyce
spoke of one neighborhood where homeowners got together and had all
the street trees pruned at once. The trees were cared for, and the
cost was a lot less than if the pruning had been done by each
homeowner separately. Joyce is hoping, and so am I, that other
neighborhoods will follow suit. Trees are one of God's greatest
natural gifts, and we should care for them well.

Thinking of trees brings me to an article in the latest
Wilderness Society magazine. Written by Jennifer Ackerman, it
speaks of the forest odor of pine and cedar trees, old wood and
leaves underfoot, and the particular uplift this odor can bring
when one walks through a forest. The author always wondered why
this scent always made her feel so good, until she came on a
Japanese study about the good effects of shinrin-yoku, or taking in
the atmosphere of the forest. The study said that "forest bathing"
can have beneficial effects on blood pressure, heart rate and
immune function. Fortunately, we have some true forests within
reasonable driving distance, so we can take advantage of this
natural medicine. And a note from a reader reminds me that the leaf
is a heraldic symbol of happiness.

Being curious about word origins, I looked up "tree," and found
it comes from Middle English from the Old English "treo(w),"
pronounced with a long e. It is akin to Old Frisian, Icelandic, Old
Saxon and Gothic words, all spelled somewhat similarly, and also
akin to the Greek "drys," meaning "oak," and the Sanskrit "dru,"
meaning "wood."

An interesting thing happened the other night. I got a phone
call from a lady asking for "Lucille." I told her I'd had my phone
number for 50 years and no Lucille had lived here all that time. It
seems she was calling a relative who was visiting an aunt in Lodi,
and the number she was given was mine, We got to chatting and she
was calling from Gatlinburg, Tenn., in the Great Smoky Mountains,
where it was cold with snow expected higher up. Seems she was born
and brought up in Oakland, later moving east. My life was just the
opposite - born and brought up in the East and moving west. The
only part of Tennessee I'd ever been in was Chattanooga, which is
not too far from Gatlinburg. Fortunately, her area had not been
damaged by all the storms. Good to talk to you, Mary Jo!

I'm sorry, I just can't get away from bewailing the increasing
use of bad grammar and the AWFUL misspellings which can't be
corrected with spell check. Use of a singular verb with a plural
subject, and vice versa, is almost a way of life, and practically
every picture caption in both local papers uses "laying" instead of
the correct "lying." I even read one story recently that misused
this verb all the way through.

And then I have read "flied solo" instead of "flew solo" and
"had swam" instead of "had swum." Past participles are going the
way of adverbs - not used. "Honey, I shrunk the kids" is a
misnomer. It should be "shrank the kids." A lesson: I swim today, I
swam yesterday, and I have swum many times. Also, I had swum in a
pool before swimming in the ocean. Also: sink, sank, have/had sunk;
drink, drank, have/had drunk; spring, sprang, have/had sprung.

Had a nice e-mail from my friends Rich and Deb Shook asking that
I pass along the idea that, when addressing Christmas cards, each
of us sends a card, with a nice note, to: A Recovering American
Soldier, c/o Walter Reed Army Medical Center, 6900 Georgia Ave.,
Washington, D.C. 20307-5001. Of course, the same idea could apply
to any military or VA hospital. I'm sure there are people out there
who know a lot of these. At any rate, it's a very good thought and
a very good thing to do.

We have not been the only ones to know parlous times. These
stern words from Cicero, Roman senator and orator, dated 55 B.C.:
"The budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled,
public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should
be tempered and controlled and the assistance to foreign lands
should be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt. People must learn to
work, instead of living on public assistance." Right on! Things
don't seem to have changed much in these past 2,000 years or
so.

Gwin Mitchell Paden has been a Lodi resident for more than
50 years, and has long been involved with many community
organizations and affairs. She is a retired Delta College/Lodi High
English teacher, and has worked in advertising, radio, and news
reporting. She was an officer in the women's Army Corps during
World War II. This is the ninth year that she has been writing this
column.